I'm working on a response to the ways in which the formal poetic devices in Marilyn Hacker's "Elegy for a Soldier" effect a thematic reading, and while doing background research encountered the term "Sapphic stanza" to describe the metrical pattern of the second section. Unfortunately, I can only find the term defined in Wikipedia, and was hoping someone could point me in the right direction for a more detailed (and authoritative) explanation of the Sapphic stanza (particularly as related to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables).

The poem "Elegy for a Soldier" is reprinted below for reference. The poem is long, granted, but it's also fantastic and totally worth reading.

Thanks!

Elegy for a Soldier
June Jordan, 1936-2002

by Marilyn Hacker

I.

The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in a Second Avenue
diner. The lover was a Quaker,
a poet, an anti-war
activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four.
Wet snow fell on the access
road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was
neither lover, slept uptown.
But the arteries, streetlights, headlines,
phonelines, feminine plural
links ran silver through the night city
as dawn and the yellow cab
passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for
that day's last or first coffee.

The city where I knew you was rich
in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc
debates, demos, parades and picnics.
There were walks I liked to take.
I was on good terms with two rivers.
You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words
lighting the page, good neighbor on your
homely street in Park Slope, whose
Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers,
dyke vegetarians, young
gifted everyone, claimed some changes
-at least a new food co-op.
In the laundromat, ordinary
women talked revolution.
We knew we wouldn't live forever
but it seemed as if we could.

The city where I knew you was yours
and mine by birthright: Harlem,
the Bronx. Separately we left it
and came separately back.
There's no afterlife for dialogue,
divergences we never
teased apart to weave back together.
Death slams down in the midst of
all your unfinished conversations.
Whom do I address when I
address you, larger than life as you
always were, not alive now?
Words are not you, poems are not you,
ashes on the Pacific
tide, you least of all. I talk to my-
self to keep the line open.

The city where I knew you is gone.
Pink icing roses spelled out
PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake.
The bookshop's a sushi bar
now, and Passion is long out of print.
Would you know the changed street that
cab swerved down toward you through cold white mist?
We have a Republican
mayor. Threats keep citizens in line:
anthrax; suicide attacks.
A scar festers where towers once were;
dissent festers unexpressed.
You are dead of a woman's disease.
Who gets to choose what battle
takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends
mourn you, with no time to mourn.

II.

You, who stood alone in the tall bay window
of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning
with free-flying words, knew the power, terror
in words, in flying;

knew the high of solitude while the early
light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry
like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint
pen, yellow foolscap.

You, who stood alone in your courage, never
hesitant to underline the connections
(between rape, exclusion and occupation)
and separations

were alone and were not alone when morning
blotted the last spark of you out, around you
voices you no longer had voice to answer,
eyes you were blind to.

All your loves were singular: you scorned labels.
Claimed black; woman, and for the rest eluded
limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out
self-definition

I have seen many poems where the author was said to be writing in sapphic stanzas, but the actual results appear to me quite different than what they claim has been intended. Take the Toronto Swinburne one for example,

"All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.

ALL the NIGHT sleep CAME not upON my EYElids,
SHED not DEW, nor SHOOK nor unCLOSED a FEAther,
YET with LIPS shut CLOSE and with EYES of IRon
STOOD and beHELD me

That stanza seems to stick fairly well to the formula, although the rhythm sounds a bit forced. Next,

THEN to ME so LYing aWAKE a VISion
(Ok so far)
CAME withOUT sleep Over the SEAS and TOUCHED me,
(I get a stumble here - seems sleep should get a stress Came without SLEEP)
SOFTly TOUCHED mine EYElids and LIPS; and I too,
(Another stumble for me, since both I and TOO seem to want a stress.)
FULL of the VISion,

[www.poeticbyway.com] />
" ... a poem with lines of eleven syllables in five feet, of which the first, fourth and fifth feet are trochees, the second a spondee, and the third a dactyl. The Sapphic strophe consists of three Sapphic lines followed by an Adonic."

I suspect the reader will be better advised to merely anticipate three long lines of variable five-stress rhythm and a short two-stress 'punch' line at the fourth. All endings will be of two-syllables (feminine).